1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a graphics rendering method, and in particular, to a fluid rendering method.
2. Description of Related Art
Due to the huge quantity of calculations to be carried out, an existing technique for rendering fluid and the interaction between fluid and terrain or dynamic objects (dynamic obstacles) usually requires a lot of calculations and very high production cost in order to achieve a good simulation effect. In particular, as to a technique which needs to simulate and render graphics in real-time, the interaction between the fluid and the terrain is usually ignored, and accordingly the quality of the visual effect is sacrificed, in order to render the graphics within a limited time.
According to an existing method for rendering fluid, a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) model is usually adopted and a mesh is carpeted on the fluid particles so that the fluid can be simulated with less fluid particles and accordingly a better performance can be achieved. However, by using the method described above, the splashed water drops, the splatting, or rapid current caused by collisions between the fluid and dynamic obstacles or the terrain cannot be presented. Thereby, the fluid simulated does not look realistic enough.
According to another existing method, a water column model is adopted for constructing fluid, wherein the heights of water is considered as water columns, each of which has a plurality of pipelines, so that the fluid is simulated as flowing along the direction of the pipelines. However, such a method can only be applied to the rendering of calm and slow fluid but still cannot actually simulate aforementioned splash effects such as water drops, splatting, or rapid current.